Army Updating 'The Way We Do Business'

WASHINGTON (07/27/2000) - If successful, the U.S. Army's nearly completed demonstration of the Single Stock Fund, an effort to revolutionize Army logistics, will clear the way for Army-wide implementation beginning in October.

The Single Stock Fund initiative requires a massive re-engineering of software.

It is designed to merge the Army's wholesale and retail inventory management and associated financial accounting practices under a single manager.

Therefore, systems used for wholesale logistics, for example, must be reconfigured to accept data from retail logistics systems.

Army officials said the result will be reduced operating costs and the ability to view and manage supplies better.

"This is a re-engineering of the way we do business, but it's not a modernization of systems," said Martin Wolfe, chief of the Business Systems Directorate of the Communications-Electronics Command's Software Engineering Institute. "We're using the same legacy systems but modifying them for a totally new way of doing business. We're taking the data from existing systems and putting it into the appropriate new format to allow us to integrate both the wholesale and retail processes into one."

The Army's current logistics system has several limitations, including:

* Outmoded technology and stovepiped systems, meaning systems are designed to suit a limited set of needs without sharing data with other systems.

Changes to several systems are involved, including the Commodity Command Standard System and the Army Materiel Command Installation Supply System.

Re-engineering the Commodity Command Standard System will cost more than $20 million, while changes made to the Army Materiel Command Installation Supply System will cost $500,000 this year alone.

"There is a tremendous amount of [software re-engineering] changes. There are about 150 engineering change proposals," Wolfe said. "Commodity Command Standard System alone has millions of lines of code."

With all but about a dozen of the changes now complete, the service is also on the verge of completing a demonstration of the re-engineered systems and processes at three installations: Fort Sill, Okla.; Fort Lewis, Wash.; and Redstone Arsenal, Ala. If the demonstration goes well, the Army will begin to implement the re-engineered process in October, slowly expanding to include the rest of the Army in 2002.

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